On the margins

I’ve got another trilogy of marginal films to less-than-recommend, though each of these films proved a little better than I expected.  I had put none of the three on my Netflix queue, but each seemed a viable on-demand option when I didn’t have a dvd on hand, and each happened to look at life out on the margins.

The honey that attracted me to The Secret Life of Bees (2008, MC-57) was the pre-Runaways Dakota Fanning, who turned out to be pretty good.  The problem is that this movie is really about black women in the Sixties South, so it’s focus on the white girl is really misdirected, though typical of Hollywood, and perhaps a hangover from Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling novel.  The real heroine of the film is Queen Latifah as the leader of a female community  -- which also includes Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys -- who runs a successful honey operation, under the logo of a Black Madonna.  A rare black female director, Gina Prince-Blythewood, with Love & Basketball (2000) to her credit, adds a little authenticity to the too-sweet, too-white-bread proceedings.  Like a second dessert, you won’t mind taking this confection in, but may feel differently after it sits on your stomach a while.

There was plenty to like in The Soloist (2009, MC-61), particularly the duet between Robert Downey Jr. as LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayres, a schizophrenic homeless man he meets on the street, who turns out to be a former Julliard cello prodigy, and becomes the focus of a number of columns and eventually a book, on which the film is based.  They definitely keep it real – and astringent -- in a story that threatens at various points to veer into sentimentality.  I found director Joe Wright to be less annoying than in his Keira Knightley duo, Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, despite expressionist tangents that annoyed some.  The supporting players, including Catherine Keener as Lopez’s ex-wife and current editor, and a scrum of genuine homeless loonies from the mean streets of LA, also keep the story from going too squishy.  Another star player is Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, a suitably destabilizing venue for Lopez’s efforts to get Ayres back on track.  Yet I wouldn’t say you’ve missed much if you don’t see the film.

The main thing you might miss in Moon (2010, MC-67) is Sam Rockwell’s celebrated dual role as a solitary attendant at an energy extraction base on the lunar surface, who through a glitch in the operation comes face to face with the clone who is meant to replace him.  Duncan Jones’s debut film is a refreshing return to high-concept sci-fi, instead of CGI blast-aways, but it reaches for more of an intellectual tingle than it achieves.  Perhaps we should refer to Jones, the son of David Bowie, as Ziggy Moondust.  His film is an engaging performance, but hardly an exploration of deep space, either out there or in here.  As a modest little conundrum, however, this speculative fiction is more than all right, and worth a look for sci-fi fans.